In the article I wrote to kick off this series called ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation’ I review several major pitfalls that often plague companies with their data management capabilities. This typically results in hindering the ability to understand and ultimately motivate their customers, which can deteriorate loyalty and hurt the bottom line. This piece looks in-depth at the sin of improvisation.
Perhaps the ‘holy grail’ for most brands is achieving the marketing buzzword ‘evangelism.’ Evangelism, in the business sense, is evolving the casual customer into a loyal fanatic of a product or brand so they preach its benefits and entice others to try it. The conversion of an evangelist is largely accomplished by delivering exceptional experiences and fantastic engagements which increasingly elevates customer loyalty. However, very few brands achieve this level of customer motivation consistently. This is largely because many brands commit some level of one of the following Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation.
1. Intimidation – Allowing the sheer complexity of data to hinder the organization
2. Ignorance – The lack of visibility of all the internal and external datasets
3. Fragmentation – A failure to bring these dispersed datasets together
4. Assumption – Ignoring the precise insight of the data in lieu of assumptions
5. Improvisation – Developing ‘wing it’ strategies that boil down to ‘one-size-fits-all’
6. Impersonalisation – The failure to deliver tailored experiences and engagements
7. Procrastination – Delaying these steps to fully understand and motivate the customer
These ‘sins’ are further exacerbated by the ‘Age of COVID.’ This has increased the complexity of customer decisions, behaviours, engagements and preferences. Therefore, avoiding these ‘sins’ is more critical to gaining holistic customer understanding to engage and motivate them, while focusing on evolving their loyalty into evangelism. With a sound plan, strong partner and proven platform, businesses can incorporate intelligence solutions that help them connect with customers and increase revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at the sin of improvisation and how it hinders championing customers.
The sin of improvisation
With the speed and complexity of change in the market today, it’s easy for brands to get frustrated in maintaining their constant evolution. This can often be the driving force behind falling into the sin of improvisation, where teams ‘go with their gut’ in the decision making processes to try to save time.
Generally, assumption-based analysis leads to improvisation-based decision making. This essentially transforms into a ‘wing it’ approach that tends to be reactionary and ineffective. This boils down to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that fails to motivate, let alone effectively engage, the wide spectrum of customer types.
The organisations that fall into this sin often bypass the evidence-based insight of data-driven intelligence. This improvisation often relies on the previous sin we reviewed, assumption. Assuming how customers behave and interact with the brand extends into basing decisions on gut instinct or past experiences. These brands not only assume the behaviours and preferences of customers, but often do so based on past experiences. These assumptions ignore precise data-driven evidence that guides the understanding of customer engagements and interactions. This essentially forces brands to guess how to react.
Today, particularly in the ‘Age of COVID,’ the complexity of customer evolution is occurring at an exponential rate. This impacts customers attitudes, behaviours, interactions and preferences. Therefore, making effective decisions based on improvisation is practically impossible. This evolving customer complexity demands data-driven intelligence to guide a business’s understanding and actions to develop strong customer connections and effectively motivate them.
As Lexi Airey, CEO of Gateway Bank – Australia explains:
“Improv in its true sense is genuinely listening to what the last person tells you and then adding to the story. It’s about not bringing shadow stories (where you make assumptions about what is really meant but haven’t taken time to understand). It’s also about not just pretending to listen and just waiting to cut in with something you want to get across but doesn’t consider the others point of view. Improv also has no designated leader- everyone contributes to bring the story and has to have everyone else’s back.”
While there can be value in improvisation it’s also dangerous if the brand isn’t effectively listening to and understanding the customer. Data intelligence provides valuable insight that validates expectations to effectively advise decisions and guide strategies.
“The worst aspect of improvisation is simply failing to listen which often results in poor business outcomes,” according to Shirley Ng, Research Principal for General Motors China. “While failing to listen to your customers can be detrimental to the business, it can be just as devastating to make decisions without the diverse perspectives across the company.”
Absolving the sin of improvisation
The key to absolving the sin of improvisation is to educate teams across the business with data-driven evidence. This ensures that they understand customers and their evolving behaviours, attitudes, experiences and preferences are rooted in facts instead of “winging in.”
According to Euan Sutherland, Group CEO at Saga plc:
“The approach to customers’ needs to be pragmatic and methodical in how you design experiences and deliver engagements. The ‘do it on the fly’ approach or doing things because it’s always been done that way simply doesn’t deliver what the customer wants. Individuals understand that they provide a tremendous amount of insight into their attitudes and behaviours and if the experiences don’t align appropriately, they often feel like the brand simply isn’t doing their job and perhaps they don’t value the customer enough to align with their needs.”
Eliminating the sin of assumption also ends the need for the sin of improvisation. Advising one’s decisions, strategy and innovation with foundational evidence delivers a methodical, pragmatic approach to delivering engagements and designing experiences that align with customer’s needs, to elevate their affinity and build their loyalty, putting them on a path towards evangelism for your brand.
As Keith Aldridge, Strategic Client Specialist for mTab explains:
“It can be too easy for brands to fall into the trap of gut-reaction guessing when it comes to their decisions. This type of improvisation all too often leads to bad decisions which can derail and even end customer relationships. Individuals are incredibly savvy today and know that they provide a wealth of insight to businesses in their activities and engagements and most expect the brand to use that information to deliver value in their experiences. Ignoring it makes the brand appear apathetic and even lazy.”
The bottom line is that committing to understanding customers helps the brand make a giant leap towards becoming customer-centric. Taking an approach that relies on apathetic guesses and ineffective improvisation basically resigns the company to a position where it appears that it doesn’t care about customer experience. Those companies that understand and embrace the ever-changing complexity of customers in how they engage and what they want and commit to understanding it through intelligent data-driven evidence are the ones that gain success by aligning their strategies, engagements and innovation with the customer to deliver them exceptional experiences.
For other articles in this series please click here (ed.)
